On Identity

The current Black Lives Matter movement is driving long-overdue conversations around racial injustice and white privilege. For many educated, progressive white people, these conversations are not new. We’ve had them in academic, political, and religious circles for decades. For many others, the terms are surprising because we didn’t realize that systemic racial injustice was still such a huge problem, and we never thought of ourselves as the beneficiaries of privileges that we’ve taken for granted because of the color of our skin. Our emotions have ranged from anger to denial to shame to determination to be and do better.

On a personal level, I have been thinking of what it means to have a white identity. I came of age in predominantly white, small-town central Texas in the early to mid-1980s. I had very little contact with people who were different from me except for Latinx people, who comprised about a third of the population of my small hometown. There were racial tensions, to be sure; and while there were some Latinx business owners, football heroes, and cheerleaders, brown-skinned people were under-represented in civic leadership and in our Protestant faith congregations. We white people mostly were either ignorant of the struggles of our Latinx neighbors, or we shamefully ignored them. A few whites were, and still are, outright racists. But as members of the local status quo, most of us didn’t have to think about what it meant to be white.

College wasn’t much better. I had my first conversations and friendships with Black people in college, but for the most part, we drama geeks kept to ourselves, and theater wasn’t something that the Black students were drawn to, most likely due to the lack of roles made available for Black actors at the time.

It wasn’t until the 1990s, when I went abroad to teach English in Korea, that I was compelled to confront my own racial and ethnic identity on a deeper level. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who did not look like me, and whose language I couldn’t understand. I had to learn to navigate a status quo that I wasn’t born into. It was both uncomfortable and life-changing, and it resulted in some of the proudest moments of my adult life. I developed a new identity based on my cultural fluidity. Many expatriates didn’t survive past their first one-year contracts. Some broke contract and left early. One American couple lasted a weekend before they exited surreptitiously in the middle of the night. I not only survived, but thrived there for over eight years!

In the late 1990s I fell in love with a Chinese-American and began a relationship that lasted more than thirteen years. I returned to America for him, and with him I learned more about the experiences of Asian-Americans. I am now married to a man who is from Hawaii, a hapa of both Japanese and Sephardic Jewish heritages. His ancestors on both sides of his family endured persecution: his father’s family during World War II, when they were already firmly American in identity but seen as the enemy by other Americans; and his mother in her European homeland, where Nazis attempted genocide on people of Jewish descent.

I confess that there is a part of me that envies all of the non-white people who became a part of my life experience—Latinx, Black, Asian-American, Jewish-American—for their strong sense of identity rooted in their race and cultural heritages. Growing up, I only had the stories my father and mother passed on to me, stories which were little more than family legend. My father said we were Scots-Irish and Black Dutch descended. My mother said her ancestor was a criminal who jumped ship in the Americas. Both sets of grandparents died before I was born, and family records were scarce, so I had little to go on. Poor people simply didn’t write a lot down back then, I guess—if they could even write at all—because who you were and where you came from were irrelevant to who you became on the frontier. The fact that my ancestors moved willingly to that frontier, however, is evidence of their privilege at the time being white.

As the internet became more ubiquitous in the early 2000s, I began to research my heritage. Through online digging and communications, I learned that my paternal ancestor left the Southeast, either one of the Carolinas or Georgia, to move to Texas in the mid-1800s. And when easy ancestry DNA testing became available, several tests returned similar results. Most recently I have learned that I am of 94% British Isles descent, more than 50% of which is Scots-Irish. The other 6% is Scandinavian. These scientific findings encouraged me to research the history of the British Isles, especially that of the Celtic peoples who settled there. I guess I could call myself an Anglo-Celtic-American.

But do I identify as white? I answer “white” when I have to complete a survey of my ethnicity. But what in the world does it mean to be “white”? I’ve met Latinx and Asian people who were literally whiter than I am. And on those survey forms, people of Middle Eastern descent are often lumped into the white category. Who decides this stuff? And do they all agree on the classifications? And why are we classified as such, anyway?

My real name doesn’t inform my whiteness, either. While it is of English origin, there is a similar-sounding Arabic name that is sometimes spelled the same way. I’ve even had Arabic people ask me what part of the Middle East I am from. And my real given name is so rare that I have only ever encountered a few individuals with it.

Constructing my identity has been a lifelong endeavor that will probably continue to my dying day. But I’m not sure I will ever identify as white; it’s more of a descriptor than an identity. I wouldn’t dare celebrate my whiteness. Nonwhites would immediately think of me as a white supremacist, and the latter would think of me as a member of their ranks, a thought that literally nauseates me. I can safely celebrate my Anglo-Celtic heritage, but my ancestor relocated to this continent more than two hundred years ago and, for whatever reason, chose not to cling to his prior identity as a British subject, so that identity is purely constructed by me based on my DNA findings, my family name, and my interest in Anglo-Celtic history and culture. I’m a native Texan, but the stereotypical Texan who wears boots and cowboy hats, carries a gun, drinks beer, goes to rodeos, and such, is so far removed from who I am that it is completely alien to me. I identify as a member of the LGBTQ community, but that has nothing at all to do with race or ethnicity.

My problem here, I think, is that I am constructing my identity through lenses and definitions that have been handed to me, rather than constructing it for myself. Labels created by academics and politicians are often self-serving. No researcher or scientist is 100% objective. No politician has 100% of the people’s best interests in mind. I would assert that labeling is usually rooted in dualistic, oppositional thinking. That’s dangerous because it creates an us vs. them mentality, the haves vs. the have-nots, the insiders vs. the outsiders. That’s not to say that the status quo doesn’t need changing; does it ever. But dualistic thinking only results in separation, not unity. It has resulted in all forms of oppression, from the subjugation of women to the enslavement of Africans and indigenous people to genocides and mass exterminations. And it continues to divide our communities today.

Each individual human being should be empowered to construct their own identity, and no one should limit them based on the color of their skin, the first language they learned, the biological sex they were assigned at birth, their gender expression, whom or how they love, how their bodies are constructed, how their minds work—nothing! Only by being able to determine for themselves who they are and who they want to become can human beings realize their full potential and create a world that is just and equitable for all. We all have a responsibility in realizing that vision, be it righting the wrongs committed by our ancestors, or making healthy choices for ourselves, or learning to be more loving and inclusive and less fearful. As for myself, I will take notes from my faith tradition and work on removing the plank from my own eye before I attempt to remove the speck from my neighbor’s eye. I will seek more to understand than to be understood. I will work to love my neighbor as myself. In loving myself, I will be the master of my own identity, and I will construct one that I can be proud of, that is respectable, kind, just, and humble.